Shakespeare's Will and his Books

With Diana Owen

In this section

Is it suspicious that no books are mentioned in Shakespeare's will?

Transcript

Owen: Books were not often mentioned in wills; they might have been listed in inventories. Sadly, the inventory
of Shakespeare’s possessions doesn’t survive. Those of his possessions that are not named as bequests were
inherited by his daughter and son-in-law, Susanna and John Hall; and in John Hall’s 1635 will, he bequeathed
what he called a ‘study of books’ to his son-in-law, Thomas Nashe, ‘to dispose of them as you see good.’ In 1637, the study of New Place (Shakespeare’s home) was broken into as part of a legal dispute, and ‘divers
books’ and ‘other goods of great value’ were taken away.

In the collections of The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust are two books which might have belonged to
Shakespeare. One is Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greciansand Romans of 1579. Our copy belonged to Lord
Strange, 5th Earl of Derby, whose company of actors performed some of Shakespeare’s early works. Perhaps
this is the very copy that Shakespeare used to write his Roman plays. In 1643, Queen Henrietta Maria (whose
husband Charles I loved Shakespeare) visited Stratford and was given the life of Katherine de Medici by
Susannah Hall, possibly from her late father’s own library.

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